


Carrion

by mrstater



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Kylo Ren Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 22:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7124629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrstater/pseuds/mrstater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey meets Kylo Ren again, and is surprised by what she sees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carrion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bratanimus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bratanimus/gifts).



> Not my first _Star Wars_ fic, but my first time (and hopefully not last time) writing these characters. Feedback fights the Dark Side. ;)

The next time Rey saw Kylo Ren without his mask, she gasped. Not like the first time, when she was surprised not to see a monster, but now because she did. Red slashed across his face, marring him, mirroring _her_. This was her work; who but a monster could wreck such damage upon another human face?

(He killed his own father…)

She ground her teeth, dug in her heels and gripped the hilt of her saber, but didn’t strike. Kylo Ren just stood there, scar glaring, red and ragged like his blade, if he’d ignited it.

“Why didn’t you fix it?” she blurted out.

The black eyes blinked at her, the pale skin puckered between his eyebrows, confused. An all too human expression on the face Rey didn’t want to believe could really belong to one.

“The scar,” she clarified. “You could have healed it. There are treatments, bacta salves… It needn’t be so prominent, at least, even if it won’t fully heal…”

As she spoke she heard the wavering confidence in her voice, and let it trail off. Perhaps because she was aware of how ridiculous it was that she should be explaining anything to _Kylo Ren_.  

“I didn’t want it to heal,” he said.

His hands went up, fingers curled. Rey braced for him to use the Force against her. Instead, he pulled off one black glove, rubbed his bare fingertips over the raised rope of ruined skin along his cheekbone.

“I need it.”

She pictured him lumbering through the snow, pounding a fist against the wound in his side ripped open by the bowcaster quarrel.

“Need it? Why?” she asked, not knowing why she was curious. Why she _cared_. “To remind you of how much you hate me?”

Kylo Ren stepped toward her–no, staggered. Sank down onto his knees. His hair fell into his face as he bowed his head, obscuring the scar.

“Because it’s all that I have,” he said. “Everything else I had of the Light was taken from me…” He shook his head. “I allowed it to be taken, because I was weak and foolish.”

(He called his father weak, and foolish. And then he killed him.)

He raised his face, curtains of hair falling back to reveal that scar once more, glistening as though the flesh were torn apart again and bleeding.

“It’s all that I have,” he repeated, and his voice broke, head bowed again.

Rey stared down at him, this wreck of a man who wept before her. If she knew anything, it was wrecks. They’d been her home, after all, her livelihood, for as long as she could remember. There had been something inherently sad to her about that Star Destroyer, that AT-AT, the detritus of the fallen Empire, in spite of what side they’d been on.

Men weren’t so different than starships, it seemed. At least not _this_ man. Kylo Ren, too, had been hollowed out. Stripped of all that was of value.  

“Not all,” she murmured, putting away her lightsaber and reaching out to trace the jagged outline of his scar with her fingertips.

His hand closed around hers, clinging to it, clasping it to his cheek, not caring that it was the hand that disfigured it. Trusting its practiced skill to find something of value in there.

In the mirror of his eyes, she didn’t see a monster. Only a scavenger.   


End file.
